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By Root 1490 0

fortune, Lancaster was in 1351 created the first English Duke outside the royal family, and subsequently built the palace of the Savoy as his residence in London. In 1352, while the truce still held between England and France, he was the star of a remarkable event in Paris. On returning from a season in Prussia, he had quarreled with Duke Otto of Brunswick and accepted his challenge to combat, which was arranged under French auspices. Given a safe-conduct, escorted by a noble company to Paris, magnificently entertained by King Jean, the Duke of Lancaster rode into the lists before a splendid audience of French nobility, but his mere reputation proved too much for his opponent. Otto of Brunswick trembled so violently on his war-horse that he could not put on his helmet or wield his spear and had to be removed by his friends and retract his challenge. The King covered the embarrassment to chivalry by a handsome banquet, at which he reconciled the two principals and offered Lancaster rich presents in farewell. Refusing them, the Duke accepted only a thorn from the Saviour’s crown, which on returning home he donated to a collegiate church he had founded at Leicester.

As religious as he was martial, he wrote in French (still the language of the English court) a devotional book called the Livre des sainetes médecines, in which he used allegory to reveal the wounds of his soul—that is to say, his sins—to Christ, the Divine Physician. Each part of the body had an allegorical wound and each remedy a matching religious symbolism. Because the Duke was examining himself, a 14th century grand seigneur emerges as a real person who admires the elegance of his long pointed toes in the stirrup, and at jousts stretches out his legs for the notice of the ladies; who also reproaches himself for recoiling from the stench of the poor and the sick, and for extorting money, lands, and other property by exercising undue influence on his courts.

In the invasion of France in 1355, Lancaster was joined by King Edward. Making for Calais instead of Cherbourg, they landed on November 2, collected a force of 3,000 men-at-arms, 2,000 mounted archers, and about as many on foot, and set out ostensibly to seek battle with the King of France while raiding the Pas de Calais, Artois, and Picardy en route.

The King of France had “solemnly and publicly” issued the arrièreban or general summons to all men between eighteen and sixty in May just before the truce ended. Perhaps owing to a poor response, it was repeated several times during the summer in Paris and all important places of the realm—“especially in Picardy,” according to one chronicler. Since a general summons brought in persons of doubtful military value, the monarchy preferred to demand the cost of a given number rather than the men themselves, and tried to fix physical standards for those who served and send the rest home. Sorting them out to assemble a fighting force took time; doubtless also, owing to recent discontents, not a few nobles dragged their feet. By November the host that Jean led north to meet the English was incomplete.

Enguerrand de Coucy VII, aged fifteen, was a part of it. Nothing is reported of what he did, only that he was present among the “barons of Picardy” in the battalion of Moreau de Fiennes, a future Marshal of France. He was in distinguished company, with his guardian, Matthieu de Roye, Master of Crossbowmen, Geoffrey de Charny, known as the “perfect knight,” and Marshal Arnoul d’Audrehem. The battalion also included the bourgeois of Paris, Rouen, and Amiens.

The campaign that was Enguerrand’s first experience of war was no stuff for heroic legend. The French host was at Amiens on November 5–7 and had advanced northward to St. Omer by November 11, bypassing en route the English on the left who were simultaneously marching south to Hesdin. The armies sniffed and circled around each other, each King issuing invitations to the other to fight—“body to body or force against force,” in the words of Jean’s challenge—which each managed to decline in ornamental verbiage. If Jean,